Zuko was thinking. A dangerous pastime, but a pastime nonetheless, and while Toph tried for the umpteenth time to get Aang to Metalbend, there was little else for him to do. He was trying to enjoy the rare free time he had now that he'd become the Fire Lord, but something just kept nagging at him, something that he'd wondered at since he was old enough to understand what people meant when they talked about it. One hundred and twelve years had passed from the time Roku had vanished to the time Aang appeared, one hundred and twelve years in which the world had been without its Avatar, without even a trace that he still existed. Zuko had always wondered where the Avatar was, and on that fateful day when he found himself banished from his home by his own father the Fire Lord, he'd made it his mission to find the Avatar in whatever distant corner he was lurking. He'd expected to find an old, broken man that had barely escaped the devastation of an entire nation, but that wasn't what he got. When at last he found proof that the Avatar was alive and well, his proof was a thin, bald twelve-year-old with blue Airbending tattoos all over his body. It shouldn't have been possible for an Airbender to have survived the genocide at all, but how could a little kid possibly have been an Airbender?

And where had he been all that time?

Zuko had been accepted slowly into what Sokka liked to call "Team Avatar", but he had also been accepted completely, and he felt confident that he knew a great deal about everybody; their pains, their joys, their struggles and their victories. Granted, a lot of their trials and tribulations had been inflicted by him or his father, but that was all water under the bridge. But despite having come to know Aang as a good kid, a gentle spirit, a powerful ally and a terrifying foe, Zuko still didn't know what had happened before he met the boy. He knew that Sokka and Katara knew, and maybe Toph did as well, but nobody ever volunteered the information, so he figured it wasn't his place to ask for it.

"You're sighing a lot."

Zuko looked around and felt his lips turn up into a soft smile. Mei returned it and sat down next to him, leaning back on her hands and watching Aang fail yet again to bend the metal that Toph was flinging at him rapid-fire.

"Things sure have changed," she noted. "You sure you don't want to tackle him and lock him up in the dungeons? Now's your chance."

Zuko laughed and shook his head; his shaggy hair tangled in his eyelashes because he'd left it down. He liked not pulling it back all the time into the Fire Lord hair piece, but soon enough it would be too long for him to leave it alone.

"I think we've finally worked past that," said Zuko, still chuckling.

Mei shrugged and leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder.

"So?"

"Hm?" he wondered, glancing down at her. Her gaze was serious, despite her playful attitude.

"Are you going to tell me why you're sighing?" she asked, tone suggesting that he was slow in the head.

Zuko looked back at the so-called "training" and heaved one of the sighs that Mei had been complementing, raising his eyes to the sky.

"It's just…" he muttered. "I want to know where Aang was all that time, and how he's still-what, twelve? Thirteen? Whatever. Roku just went and vanished, and Aang showed up a hundred and twelve years late. I'm just...I don't know."

"Here's a crazy idea," said Mei, and her tone was wry. "You could ask him. Since you two are all buddy-buddy now, I'm sure he'll tell you."

"It's not that simple," Zuko said heavily. "I mean, that's kind of a big thing. If he hasn't told me, maybe it's because he doesn't want me to know."

"Or," Mei suggested, moving away and laying flat on the ground, "it's because you never showed any interest. Remember, you were always like Capture the Avatar, restore my honor!"

Zuko cringed and ran a hand over his face at her portrayal of his...less fine years. She made an amused noise at his reaction.

"I don't know any of them all that great," she continued, sounding bored. "But they don't seem like people that'll give you an answer until you ask."

"What are you guys talking about over there?" called a chipper voice from the courtyard. Zuko looked around and watched as Aang, whose attention was diverted to him, got pelted in the stomach by a barrage of little metal balls. He laughed as the Airbender cringed and collapsed on the ground, groaning pathetically and clutching his middle.

"Pay attention, Twinkletoes!" Toph ordered. "No breaks until you can block these pellets with Metalbending!"

"Uh...Toph," Zuko ventured hesitantly, wary of the girl's temper and her skill. "Aang might not be able to Metalbend. I mean, didn't you kind of invent it to begin with?"

"Of course," she said smugly, standing up a little straighter. "But he's the Avatar, he should be able to do it all."

"Well, he can't bend Lightning either," Zuko pointed out. "And I don't think he can Bloodbend. Can you?"

Aang shook his head vigorously. Satisfied, the Fire Lord turned back to the first Metalbender.

"So maybe the Avatar just doesn't do the secondary bending thing," he offered with a shrug.

"Look, it's not my fault if his other teachers," she said with a pointed grin at him, "weren't good enough to show him the advanced stuff, but I'm not gonna rest until he gets it."

"I have a feeling you won't be resting in our grave, then," Zuko muttered.

"I heard that."

Zuko winced, but Toph just started to laugh.

"You know what?" she said after a time. "Whatever. Go play with the Fire Lord, Twinkletoes, I think he's right. It was hard enough just to get you to Earthbend. Metalbending might be too tough for you."

Far from getting offended at the insinuation that he couldn't handle the tougher aspects of bending each element, Aang lept to his feet with his customarily goofy grin splitting his face.

"Thanks Toph!" he said cheerfully as the girl walked off.

"Yeah, whatever," she snorted, waving over her shoulder before she disappeared into the Fire Palace.

"Is she really alright on her own?" Mei wondered. "She's blind, right?"

"Yeah," Aang said, coming over to hover with the technique he called his air scooter. "But she can see with her feet."

"Uh, what?" Mei said, her brow creasing.

"Well, with Earthbending, technically," Aang amended. "She can feel the vibrations in the earth through her feet and uses those to build up her surroundings. Almost like wolfbats with echolocation, except it's in the ground."

"That's…weird," Mei said with a shake of her head. She climbed back to her feet, brushing her fingertips briefly over the top of Zuko's head before she began to walk after the other girl. "Whatever. I'll see you two later."

Zuko didn't miss her intention. She was leaving the two of them alone.

Aang noticed how tense Zuko was and alighted gracefully on his feet, his air scooter dissipating as he sat down next to his friend.

"Something wrong?" he wondered, looking up at Zuko curiously.

"Not...Not exactly," the Fire Lord replied, glancing away. He felt almost as uneasy and awkward then as he had when he was rehearsing his apology speech to "Team Avatar" just a few months ago. "I...uh, I was just thinking…"

Aang laughed. "Don't hurt yourself, Zuko," he joked.

Zuko's lips twitched into a small smile even as he sighed.

"Well, I was wondering…"

"Yeah?"

"Where…Where were you? I mean, before I found you?"

When he glanced around, Zuko saw that his friend's face had fallen dramatically.

"You don't have to answer," Zuko said quickly, waving his hands frantically at the gloomy expression on Aang's face. "I was just curious, but if it bothers you-"

"It's fine, Zuko," Aang assured him with a small smile that fell moments later. "It's just…It wasn't one of my finer moments."

Zuko couldn't help it; he snorted out loud.

"I've had a fair few of those moments myself, Aang," he pointed out. Aang chuckled.

"Yeah, I guess so," he acknowledged.

His dark eyes adopted a faraway look as he cast them up to the sky, and Zuko found himself following the boy's gaze like his answer might be written in the clouds.

"A hundred years ago, the monks took me inside while I was playing with some of my friends," Aang started quietly. "I didn't know why. They took me to a room full of toys, and they said to pick four at random. I didn't get it, but I went ahead and picked the toys that I just really liked. When I showed them my choices, they all started talking really quietly. Monk Gyatso wasn't too happy, but he didn't argue with them, whatever they were saying. After that, they told me that the four toys I'd chosen were the toys that Avatar Roku had chosen when he was a kid. They tested me with each of the elements after, and they all reacted to being near me. That was when they told me I was the Avatar."

Contrary to what Zuko expected, Aang didn't sound all that excited about the revelation, and he wondered if the boy had responded any differently when he'd been told the first time.

"I didn't think anything was different," he continued. "And Monk Gyatso didn't act like it was, either. He still played Pai Sho with me and treated me like I was his son, but the other monks said I wasn't allowed to do that anymore. They said I had to devote all my time to mastering the elements. Monk Gyatso said I still needed time to be a kid, but the other monks told him that he was too soft. Still, I tried to be a normal kid, but when I went to play with my friends like we'd played for years, they said I couldn't anymore. They said that I had an unfair advantage, since I was the Avatar."

Zuko frowned, trying to imagine that kind of life, and realized that it wasn't all that difficult. Being surrounded by people who made you feel wanted one day and then made you feel like a complete outcast the next wasn't exactly a new thing for Zuko. One thing changes, and suddenly you're like a totally different person, and no one will even look at you the same because of it. Maybe he had more in common with Aang than he thought.

The boy in question laid back on the ground like Mei had only moments ago, crossing his arms over his chest and still gazing at the sky. Zuko turned to face Aang fully, crossing his legs while he waited.

"Later, I was going to talk to Monk Gyatso about it," Aang continued, and his voice was a little thick. "But before I went into his room, I heard the other monks talking inside. They were saying that Monk Gyatso was too emotionally invested in me, and that I couldn't train properly while he was still treating me like any other kid. They wanted to send me away, to a different Air Temple, to finish my training."

"So Gyatso was too much a father to you?" said Zuko incredulously. Aang shrugged, his expression hopeless.

"I guess. Anyway, when I heard that I panicked. I didn't want to go to an all new place and have all these new people staring at me. I wanted to be a kid, I wanted to play and have fun. I never asked to be the Avatar. I ran away."

Zuko's eyebrows shot up. Well, that explained how he'd managed to escape the mass extinction of the Air Nomads.

"I took Appa and we ran. I had no idea where to go. Maybe to the Earth Kingdom; I had a lot of friends there. I had friends in the Fire Nation too, although I guess it turned out to be a good thing that I didn't make it there." He chuckled a little, and Zuko let slip a wry smile. "But it didn't matter. We got caught up in this awful storm, and I couldn't control it. We ended up getting pulled under the water near the Southern Water Tribe, and I don't really remember what happened after. I think I must've entered the Avatar State in self-defense, but it's all hazy. The next thing I knew, I was surrounded by ice and snow and Appa, and Katara was trying to shake me awake."

"So….what? You were just...frozen for a hundred years?" Zuko said, his tone clearly skeptical.

"You could say that, yeah," Aang sighed. "I didn't know when I woke up. I figured maybe a couple days had passed. That's why I was so confused when I saw the Fire Nation attacking the Water Tribe."

Zuko grimaced, having the decency to be ashamed.

"I didn't mean to do it," Aang said, trying to justify as much to himself as to anybody. "I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I never dreamed that I'd be gone for a hundred years, and I never thought the nations would turn on each other. I never meant to abandon the world, I didn't. But I-I just-"

"You panicked."

"...Yeah," Aang said heavily.

Zuko looked up at the sky again.

He understood. He understood just fine. Having a mountain thrust upon your shoulders after a life of ease wasn't easy to handle, and it wasn't as exciting as some people thought. It was terrifying. Whether it was being banished from your home or imprisoned within it, the responsibility that accompanied the isolation was crushing and absolute, and there was nobody you could push it off on, however hard you tried. It made it hard to walk. It made it hard to think. It made it hard to breathe. But no one had a choice. You either fought to walk and think and breathe anyway, or you let the weight crush you into nothing and break you body, mind, and soul.

"I'm not proud of it," the Avatar sighed. "But it's too late to take it back."

"I don't blame you, Aang," Zuko told him. "I don't know what I would've done in that kind of situation."

Aang's lips twitched. "Would've made hunting the Avatar down a little frustrating for you, I bet."

Zuko laughed loudly and didn't respond. Aang stayed where he was for a few more minutes, then sat up and jumped to his feet, clapping his hands together. His friend blinked up at him, surprised by his sudden burst of energy.

"I wanna try metalbending again," Aang said absentmindedly, and he took off down the hall where Toph had disappeared. "See you Zuko!"

Zuko held up a hand after the fleeing boy, still smiling, then laid back with his arms folded beneath his head. Yeah, he could relate to the Avatar, as weird as that seemed. A hundred years passed after Aang ran away from a destiny he couldn't escape, finding Zuko running after a destiny that wasn't his. Looking at Aang was like looking into a mirror, seeing equal and opposite aspects of himself. It had taken a year of unbelievable pain, frustration, confusion, and loss for Zuko to understand that, and it had taken that horrid, agonizing year for him to rise up in adversity and become the person he was truly meant to be. After a year, Zuko would never have recognized himself as the same angry, broken boy that had left the Fire Nation shamed and scarred by his own father.

The scar hadn't faded, but he no longer let it define him. The scar might as well have never existed, because Zuko felt light and free and happy for the first time since he'd been given it. Honestly, that scar was the best gift his father had ever given him, just like his banishment was the best thing Ozai could have done for him. He had learned a great deal from both, and he'd learned it all alone. Well, not really alone. That was his own perception, because he'd shut everyone out for so long that he could be surrounded by loving friends and not have noticed. He knew now that he had only been alone when he turned away his uncle and rejected the possibility of an alliance with the Avatar. When he'd been chasing his "honor", when he'd been fighting alongside his sister, when he'd been playing daddy's-perfect-son: That was when he had been alone. After a year, he understood that. He also understood that he would never be alone again, not as long as he kept those he cared for close to his heart, because even when they died, they would never be forgotten. As long as he had people he loved, they would never be gone.

A lot could happen in a year, couldn't it?